New Georgia Athletic Director Greg McGarity has a rough (pardon the pun) job ahead of him when it comes to overseeing the football program. It's not enough that he needs to put a stop to the Fulmer Cup winning string of off the field incidents involving Bulldog team members. Or make sure nobody sells their jerseys for thirty pieces of silver $1,000 like A.J. Green. It goes deeper than that.
Greg McGarity needs to find Georgia's manhood. Not Georgia's swagger, mind you, but its manhood.
The past two seasons have shown that Georgia's manhood is seriously lacking. Saturday's disastrous loss to South Carolina is proof of that. This should have been the game for players to step up and fill the vacuum that A.J. Green's moment of idiocy created. Instead, the Bulldog nation was faced with two field goals. This is a team that was totally deflated over the week's drama over Green's eligibility.
The fact that Georgia seems to have cowered from the most trivial of things like alternate uniforms shows a lack of belief in itself. Black jerseys and black helmets weren't responsible for lad losses against Alabama and Florida in the past two years. They were due to a bad defensive coordinator. While Todd Gratham is a superior DC to Willie Martinez, he needs players that have a spine and show that losing is not an option.
McGarity and Mark Richt seriously need to find where Georgia's manhood went. Three years ago, it seemed that Georgia was ready to break through the mental barriers that have kept it in the middle of the SEC pack for the past twenty years or so. Instead, the program has edged closer and closer to the bottom, just above Ole Miss and South Carolina. Years ago, losing to South Carolina would have been an upset. Now it isn't.
Georgia needs to find what it manhood really means, and what it doesn't mean. It doesn't mean drinking and driving and forgetting not-so-trivial things like your drivers license. It means the willingness to take responsibility. Through that comes the willingness to take risks. The willingness to be bold when the situation calls for it, and not to be reckless at the same time.
McGarity has a hard task at hand, which doesn't seem to be getting easier. If the Bulldogs' season spirals too out of hand, he might be having to make serious decisions over the direction of the program which won't be easy. But manhood calls for that. Georgia needs to reclaim its soon.